Free Guns Of the Timberlands (1955) by Louis L'amour

the reason why he had chosen to get his timber from the Deep Creek forest.
    No loan was to be had and he could ship no cattle. He was broke, flat broke.
    He held the only two known routes into Deep Creek, but the enemy held the whip hand. Kesterson might continue to sell him supplies but it would mean a gun battle to get them. He was encircled and they could draw the noose tighter. It was small consolation that they could scarcely starve him out as long as he had beef.
    One man was dead. Bell knew his own shooting well enough to know he had killed the unknown drygulcher who fired from the loft door.
    His first shot had disarmed the man, his second had killed him. This was war--war to the death. Devitt had made that obvious in the brutal attack on Garry and Jones. And now in this attempt to kill him from ambush.
    Bell could have spared the man in the loft, but only to give him another chance. And in this battle there were to be no second chances for anyone.
    Jud Devitt had prepared his ground well, and it was equally obvious that he intended to use the forces of the law whenever possible. The old shooting in which Montana Brown had engaged had long ago been dropped without a charge being filed. No jury would convict him now, but he could be arrested and held for trial, and to resist arrest would be to play right into Devitt's hands. Clay had no doubt the warrant would be served by a posse made up of Devitt's own men.
    Drawing up at the crest of a low hill, he scanned his back trail. It was growing late, and the sun was already behind the mountain. The softness of desert evening was settling over the mesquite country, and he sat his horse a minute, studying the terrain with a careful eye. At no time would he be safe, but there was nothing on the trail, no dust, no movement.
    The palouse, restless for home, moved off of his own volition, and Clay let him go. The air was cooler now with the sudden coolness of a desert sundown. The pastels of evening gathered in changing color along the far off hills. The sky held a lone star, and somewhere a coyote yapped shrilly.
    Before him the dark mass of the mountain loomed, bare rock, tufted with vegetation in the draws and canyons, and showing the darkness of forest on its higher slopes. A distant sound, foreign to the evening, caught his ears: he drew up sharply against the black of a clump of brush, listening.
    The night was silent . . . no sound . . . only cool air, refreshing as a drink of clear, cold water. He drew it deep into his lungs, touched with the faint scent of sage. The palouse moved on, and slowly his hand came away from his gun butt.
    Each clump of mesquite or juniper now was a spot of darkness. The floor of the desert was gray . . . more stars blossomed in the clear field of the sky. His horse walked on, and suddenly, there was a flicker of darker shadow among the mesquite clumps and metal clicked.
    Clay threw himself flat along the horse just as something struck him a wicked blow on the shoulder. He grabbed wildly at the saddle horn and clutched it with a drowning man's grip. There was another shot, and he was struck again, and he seemed to go tumbling forward, over and over into soft, velvety darkness, but his fingers clung to the one real thing in all this nightmare . . . the saddle horn. With all his will, his fingers shut down on it and held.
    Through a heaving, roaring blackness he felt himself plunging ahead. Behind him there was another sharp, splitting crack . . . then no other sound.
    Clay Bell fought his way back to consciousness into the sunlight. He lay flat on his back, half under a tree, and the sky beyond the tree was blue and flecked with fleecy clouds. He could hear his horse cropping grass near by, and he lay very still, afraid to move, trying to locate himself.
    He had been to Tinkersville. That much was clear. There had been trouble there, but he'd ridden safely from the town. He scowled over that, puzzling at what else might have happened and where he